AUTHOR
Cosima Somerset
Cosima Somerset was given the priceless opportunity to spend ten years following and learning from Father Joe Pereira - a priest, yoga master, and champion of recovery, a friend to addicts – worldwide. The Catching Force is the chronicle of those years.
ABOUT COSIMA
Cosima Somerset is a London-based entrepreneur and writer. She founded Concierge London in 2000 — now SomersetWhite, operating across London, New York and Los Angeles.
Her earlier career took her from Andy Warhol's Interview magazine in New York in the 1980s, working under editor Shelley Wanger, to London's literary world with agent Gillon Aitken. In the 1990s she worked as a researcher on TV documentaries, including Tory Wives and Juries.
The Catching Force is her first book. It grew from a decade of personal diaries written while following Father Joe Pereira across the world, and from her own experience of chronic back pain and depression. Revelations along the way, the kindness and wisdom of other people, and ways to manage these physical and mental conditions, will hopefully be of benefit to others.
She lives in London. She has a passion for horses, dogs, yoga and cold water.
"I had never met anyone like him before — somebody who embodied the principles of uprightness, goodness, compassion and discipline."
THE BOOK
"Addiction is a physical ailment as well as a mental one. My approach is to treat the body and the mind through yoga."
Father Joe travels from a small town in India to the slums of Calcutta and Mumbai to work with Mother Teresa.
Following her death, he carries on her work among alcoholics, drug addicts, prostitutes and thieves. But The Catching Force is more than a biography about a man of faith and his journey. Above all, it is a story of hope, of a healing dynamic arising out of defeat and humiliation; the catching force of unconditional love that enables Father Joe to heal pain through the gift of yoga and replace desperation with a new life of freedom and happiness.
Cosima Somerset’s first book is a story of extraordinary depth, power and perception about one man’s love of humanity that guides him through a cruel, unequal and often dangerous world, interwoven with Cosima’s own challenges with debilitating depression.
The Catching Force arose from a chance meeting in the tropical paradise of Goa between author Cosima Somerset, a British woman, and Catholic priest Father Joe Pereira, who ministers to alcoholics and other addicts.
For the next ten years, Cosima follows Father Joe around the world, keeping a highly personal diary of his astonishing healing powers through yoga, while gradually winning his trust and learning of his own remarkable story.
Father Joe Pereira
In the Press
PRESS
